IT major Microsoft has announced
a reduction of $100 in the price of its Surface Pro Tablet to boost up the revenues. A few days earlier the
tech giant revealed that it had suffered a huge loss in this base as marketing
the tablets cost them much more than the revenue they have brought in, CNET reports.
The discount is likely to attract much more interested tablet buyers for
sure, and that might be able to change the scenario. Microsoft has done
aggressive marketing for its Surface Pro Tablet in past months and that
eventually has cost them lots of money. But the tablets have failed to generate
the same amount of money in terms of revenue, and ultimately became one of the
most non-performing devices of the company.
Popular tech news publication The Verge reported the Microsoft’s discount offer for the first
time, and then several other leading websites followed the trend. Eventually
the new price of Microsoft’s 64GB and 128GB tablets are 799 and $899
respectively.
Earlier the company reduced the price of its Surface RT tablets by s
much as 30 percent and the latest offer have came almost three weeks after that
announcement. It seems like Microsoft is all set to give its much-needed
attention to its tablets section in order to come up with good profitable
numbers for this base. Google too has joined the list with its Nexus 7 to make this base more competitive on the worldwide scenario.
In October 2012 Microsoft unveiled its Surface RT tablets, and since
then it has managed to earn only $853 million in revenue, which is lower than the
$900 million which the tech company had to pay inventory adjustments for
Surface RT. Surprisingly the revenue is also less than the $898 million that
the firm spent for the marketing and advertising of the Surface and Windows 8.
However, Microsoft didn’t give us a single hint whatsoever about the
number of units it has managed to sell. The company didn’t even mention the
individual revenue that have been generated either by the Surface Pro or the
Surface RT. In March 2013, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has sold around 1.5 million
Surface tablets till then. But surprisingly almost 1 million of those sales
were parked by the RT version of tablets only. Bloomberg added that those sales
numbers were almost half of what the company had expected initially while
launching the products.
It has to be added here that last month its rival Apple announced that it had successfully sold 14.6 million iPads in the last
quarter alone. This simply means Microsoft is lagging far behind in this base,
and it needs to buck up as soon as possible to turn it around.
Final Words
Though Microsoft reduces the price of its Surface Pro tablets by $100, it
doesn’t assure its success in the days to come. The global tablet market has
become very much competitive over the years with the inclusion of Google’s Nexus 7, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Apple’s iPad Mini. Now we have to wait
and watch to see how Microsoft’s Surface tablets will perform in upcoming days.
